In the last post, I had loaded up the bike with a simple timing curve and taken it for a test ride. However, I have been meaning to actually measure the timing advance with the stock ignition unit rather than relying on hearsay. This weekend I finally press-ganged Kathy into helping. When I previously had …
Continue reading ‘Microsquirting the NC30, part #12: Timing measurement’ »
After getting the spark hardware hooked up, it was time to get the Microsquirt to know about crankshaft motion. As I mentioned in the last post, the motor has two “pulse generator” coils offset from each other. My hope was that the signal from these coils could be hooked up as-is, since this is a …
Continue reading ‘Microsquirting the NC30, part #11: Crank trigger’ »
As of the last post, the bike was running with all sensors functional and it was time to make the Microsquirt finally do something useful: control the ignition. To understand the setup, we have to go into some amount of detail. The way (most) ignition systems work is using an ignition coil, which has two windings, …
Continue reading ‘Microsquirting the NC30, part #10: Spark hardware’ »
Finally, it was time to go for a test ride. You can view and log data over Bluetooth with a phone using the MSdroid Android app. Going out for a ride, everything seemed good until the RPM gauge spiked to 10k and then back down. Uh oh — this is what the Atmega does when …
Continue reading ‘Microsquirting the NC30, part #9: Some debugging’ »
I was feeling pretty good about how things were going when I “just” had hooking up the tachometer left. That’s when I ran into an unsolved problem. From looking at the tachometer signal with the oscilloscope, I had determined that it consisted of short, square pulses, 4 per engine revolution. The Microsquirt outputs a tachometer …
Continue reading ‘Microsquirting the NC30, part #8: The tachometer’ »
Since the last post, the oxygen sensors are functional! While I had tested the controller boards when I initially built them, they’ve been sitting around since then. Now it was time to pack them into the box. It was quite fiddly getting all the wires in place, but eventually it all got stacked up and …
Continue reading ‘Microsquirting the NC30, part #7: Reading lambda’ »
All that remained before we’d have the Microsquirt alive when the last post ended was to plug everything into the connector… only there was a small setback. The minimal test was to only wire up the power and the serial lines and make sure that we could talk to it over the Bluetooth modem. Except …
Continue reading ‘Microsquirting the NC30, part #6: It’s alive!’ »
With the fusebox mostly wired up, it was time to deal with the other wires. While I’m trying to “repurpose” wires in the stock harness when possible, that mostly helps when connecting up existing things like the lights. For the new sensors, I needed to pull new wires. First step was to add an intake …
Continue reading ‘Microsquirting the NC30, part #5: More wiring’ »
With the oxygen sensors mounted and the wideband controller box finished, I could finally start doing the wiring. While this seems like a simple task, I had a hard time deciding how to do it. The big question in my mind was how to wire the power buss part of the fusebox. This requires connecting the …
Continue reading ‘Microsquirting the NC30, part #4: Wiring up the fusebox’ »
In the last post, I described the electronics used to talk to the wideband oxygen sensor controllers. What remained to do was to physically mount the sensors themselves in the exhaust pipes. The sensors themselves are quite large, so I struggled a bit with finding a good place to mount them on the famously cramped NC30. …
Continue reading ‘Microsquirting the NC30, part #3: Mounting the Oxygen sensors’ »